ARTS ABROAD

ARTS ABROAD; Praise Doesn't Equal Fame, but Playwright Persists

By James F. Clarity

Published: July 29, 1999

DUBLIN, July 28—
Tom Murphy, a soft-spoken, sometimes depressed 64-year-old writer from County Galway in the west, is in the view of many critics Ireland's other great playwright -- that is, other than Brian Friel.

For though Mr. Murphy has written 25 plays in 37 years, and many of them have been well received in Europe and the United States, he has never had a popular and critical hit of the magnitude of Mr. Friel's ''Dancing at Lughnasa'' or ''Philadelphia, Here I Come!'' Hugh Leonard, the author of ''Da,''and of many comedies, who is also of the Friel-Murphy generation, is also better known. None of Mr. Murphy's plays have become films.

And two younger Irish writers are more popular. Martin McDonagh (''The Beauty Queen of Leenane'') and Conor McPherson (''The Weir'') have been filling theaters here, in London and in New York.

But Mr. Murphy persists. His most recent play, ''The Wake,'' now at the Abbey Theater, was actually written two years ago, after eight years in which he wrote an adaptation but no original plays. Like most of Mr. Murphy's plays, it is pleasing but also daunting critics and audiences.

''I'm a difficult playwright to interpret for audiences and for actors,'' he said in an interview this afternoon at his home in the prosperous Rathgar section of Dublin. ''That's because the thing that comes first for me is the emotions, the feeling. Life to me is feeling. I try to tell a story, but I think that my kind of writing aspires to the condition of music. Mamet, for example, writes musically, takes four-letter words and turns them into poetry.''

The critic Fergus Linehan, former arts editor of The Irish Times, called Mr. Murphy ''a great playwright'' and said: ''But he is very far from the romantic. His work has a bitterness, a bleakness that makes it less attractive to wider audiences. Tom has never had a popular hit like Friel. People who never go to the theater flooded to 'Lughnasa.' ''

He added: ''What Tom is saying is equally valid and universal. But it is more difficult to come at.''

''There are great, big, long convoluted speeches, and great rolling floating clouds, lit by flashes of lightning,'' said Mr. Linehan, whose wife, Rosaleen Linehan, one of Ireland's favorite actresses, has performed in several Murphy plays and played Kate in Mr. Friel's ''Lughnasa'' here, in London and on Broadway.

Patrick Mason, the artistic director of the Abbey, who directs ''The Wake,'' said in an interview that Mr. Murphy is ''one of the great playwrights of the Irish theater.'' He continued: ''He's up there with Friel and Leonard. His work is characterized by extraordinary inner intensity. He plays the music of the soul. He has an extraordinary ability to record the inner sound of the character.

''Tom is one of the most challenging and idiosyncratic of Irish writers. His theater is a theater of the extraordinary, often violent, very disturbed, verging on the operatic. It makes emotional demands on performers and audiences alike. But whatever the demands, the rewards are extraordinary.''

''The Wake'' is about a 40-ish Irish woman returning home to a small town after years as a high-priced prostitute in the United States, and her conflict with her scandalized, money-grubbing, bigoted relatives. The woman, Vera, played by Jane Brennan, was described as ''an Irish Blanche DuBois'' by the English critic Michael Billington in The Guardian.

The play, based on Mr. Murphy's only novel, ''The Seduction of Morality,'' has raucous, sometimes dark humor. The only Protestant character, an alcoholic, jokes at his own failure to reform: ''I have nothing to declare but my schizophrenia,'' an allusion to Oscar Wilde's wisecrack as he arrived at Customs in New York: ''I have nothing to declare but my genius.'' The play is to move this summer to the Edinburgh Festival.

One of Mr. Murphy's highly praised works, ''Conversations on a Homecoming,'' is about a man returning to tell huge lies about his success in America. One of his most harrrowing plays, ''Famine,'' is about how the Irish suffered in the potato blight of the 1840's. Not only are the English colonial rulers shown to be guilty of inaction, but also Clancy, a wealthy Catholic merchant, refuses to help the starving, although the catastrophe reduced Ireland's population to three million from nine million.

Many critics say that Mr. Murphy's best play is ''The Gigli Concert,'' in which an untalented real estate developer seeks the help of a phony singing teacher to help him sing like Beniamino Gigli, the acclaimed Italian opera tenor who died in 1957.

Near the end of the play, which is Mr. Murphy's favorite, the teacher, who winds up learning to sing better himself, says to his pupil: ''I longed to take myself captive and root myself, but you came in the door with the audacity of despair, wild and with an idea of wanting to soar, and I was the most pitiful of spiritless things.''

The audacity of despair, Mr. Murphy said, helps him create. ''I undergo forms of depression,'' he explained. ''I know about depression. How do you write about depression? I wake up in the morning sometimes and I'm in a good humor. Or I'm in bad humor, or I'm in between, at the whim of Life slash God. I resent being the victim of Life, so I say: 'O.K. I can do it too. I can decide what sort of mood a character is in.' ''

When he is not depressed, which is most of the time, Mr. Murphy smiles now and then, makes coffee and says he is getting restless because he has finished a new play and has not written much since April. The new play, ''A Little Love, a Little Kiss,'' a story of Irish emigrants returning home, is to be produced at the Abbey next year.

Among the writers who have influenced him, he said, are the American philosopher William James and the playwrights John Millington Synge, Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. He added about Mr. Miller, ''But I can't stand all that moralizing.''

Mr. Murphy said that his writing had been helped, years ago, by watching his children playing doctors and nurses. ''Their playacting -- it's as if they were already translating their feelings into an art form.''

He and Mr. Friel are ''old, old friends,'' he said, without a trace of envy or jealousy of Mr. Friel's success. ''Brian does his thing,'' he said. ''I do my thing.''

Photo: ''Life to me is feeling,'' said the playwright Tom Murphy, shown in his home in Dublin. (Derek Spiers for The New York Times)